Not unlike miss Britney throwing a hissy fit in a photo studio, the Lady Knox Geyser burped, fizzed, bubbled and spouted angry steam in jets of up to 20 metres in height, right in the face of an awestruck crowd. It's not difficult to see why they chose to shoot The Lost World at Wai-o-Tapu, known on the north island of New Zealand as a Thermal Wonderland.

The panoramic landscapes of hissing fumeroles, plopping mud and giant pools steaming with a thousand natural chemical reactions create a whole new world of incredible colour that's practically impossible to catch on film!

Some of us have been lucky enough to have seen some amazing landscapes before, mostly in the wilds of mid-America's national parks. But those were plains of rocks and desert and only came in varying shades of red and brown. Here were glistening lakes of turquoise melting into aquatic fields of orange; beaches of florescent yellows opening into oceans of emerald green and shores of champagne pink bubbling into streams of rusty red.

All the digitally recreated images in my camera couldn't hope to capture it all in its truest form on the drive from Rotorua towards Taupo, under a cloudless blue sky. Of course, we joined the hundreds of tourists doing their best to try.

Parts of Wai-o-Tapu were like walking on a frightening, foreign planet. Huge volcanic craters threaten to widen even further and swallow more of the earth in one greedy gulp. It's an awe-inspiring place, really. But that's just a tiny part of it. Peter Jackson knew the world would fall in love with New Zealand when he shot the Lord of the Rings trilogy amongst the country's sweeping landscapes, and since the hobbits went into battle, tourism has risen dramatically.

The Piano, Heavenly Creatures, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe were all shot on location and rumour has it that the film adaptations of The Lovely Bones, Dambusters and dragon fantasy series Temeraire are all set to bring the slebs over shortly. Looks like New Zealand is the new Hollywood, folks.